The refresh is centered around the latest version of new dual-core Intel Itanium 2 Montecito processor, Tim Danielsen, worldwide product line manager, Business Critical Servers, told ServerWatch.

HP is claiming twice the performance of the previous generation of HP Integrity servers and more than double the price-to-performance ratio of competitive offerings from the low-end RX 2620 to the flagship Superdome server.

With this release, HP is also extending the multi-operating system capabilities of the HP Virtual Server Environment for Integrity servers to help customers grow and shrink virtual servers as needed.

The server mantra as of late has been to deliver mainframe-caliber high availability at an entry-level server price, and the HP Integrity rx6600 and rx3600 servers are no exception to this trend. They deliver a slew of record TPC-C benchmarks.

Both systems are available with HP-UX 11i, Microsoft Windows, Linux and OpenVMS. They include the HP zx2 chipset, which doubles the energy efficiency of previous generations and reduces power and cooling costs by up to 50 percent.

The rx6600 is a 4-processor, four core systems, and the rx3600 is a 2-processor, four-core system.

HP has not overlooked the importance of virtualization. Later this year, it plans to add support for Windows to HP Integrity Virtual Machines, which will enable multiple operating system instances to share a single processor.

At that point, HP intends to extend support for HP Integrity Essentials Capacity Advisor and Virtualization Manager to Windows and Linux.

Danielsen notes the growth of the applications for the Itanium platform has doubled this year alone. More than 9,000 apps are now available for business intelligence, enterprise resource planning, J2EE application services, transactional database and high-performance technical workloads.

HP also recently announced the HP Information Technology Service Management Assessment and Improvement Services process enhancements to further increase uptime and productivity. The HP Data Center Portfolio of Services is also designed to increase data center efficiencies for space and power usage.

The servers began shipping September 1. The HP Integrity rx3600 starts at $10,531, the Integrity rx6600 starts at $14,771. The entry-level rx2620 is priced from $4,884.